A showcase of the Cleveland Museum of Art's internationally important collection of British portrait miniatures, dating from the late sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Author Cory Korkow includes new research about the artists, sitters, and owners of these miniatures. Highlights include exquisite miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver, Samuel Cooper, and Richard Cosway.

This publication brings forward a group of remarkable British portrait miniatures, issued on the occasion of an exhibition that presents the entire collection of portrait miniatures at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a collection or works which has a worldwide reputation based on quality and condition, rather than exhaustive coverage. Executed on vellum, card, paper, ivory and enamel, and often housed in the most extraordinary cases that are integral to the work, portrait miniatures are complicated objects meant to be examined up close and from all sides. Several are published here for the first time.